HGST Sets New World Record with 3 Million IOPS SSD

HGST has announced a new PCI Express SSD with 3 million IOPS in queued environments and a random read access latency of 1.5 ms in non-queued settings. HGST demonstrated this new technology at the Flash Memory Summit 2014.

“The PCM SSD demonstration is a great example for how HGST sets the pace of the rapidly evolving storage industry,” said Steve Campbell, chief technology officer, HGST. “This technology is the result of several years of research and advanced development aimed at delivering new levels of acceleration for enterprise applications. The combination of HGST’s low-latency interface protocol and next-generation non-volatile memories delivers unprecedented performance, and creates exciting opportunities for new software and system architectures that HGST is exploring with our customers and industry partners.”

The memory used in this SSD consists of Phase Change Memory (PCM) components with a capacity of 1Gb. PCM is one of several new classes of high-density, non-volatile memories that exhibit dramatically faster read access times when compared to NAND Flash memory.

In order to fully expose the capabilities of these new memory technologies to the server system and its software applications, HGST has also developed a low-latency interface architecture that is fully optimized for performance and is agnostic to the specific underlying memory technology. HGST used its controller expertise to integrate the 45 nm 1Gb PCM chips to build a prototype full height, full length PCIe Gen 2×4 SSD card.

To achieve latencies close to 1us, HGST devised, in conjunction with researchers at the University of California, San Diego, a new communication protocol. This new interface protocol was introduced earlier this year at the 2014 Usenix conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST).

“Three million IOPs is exceptional, but that is not the most exciting part of the demonstration,” said Dr. Zvonimir Bandic, manager of Storage Architecture at HGST Research. “What is really exciting is to be able to deliver latencies close to 1us for small block random reads. This is something that just cannot be done with NAND Flash and current controller and interface technologies.”

The HGST PCM SSD will be demonstrated in the HGST booth #316 at the 2014 Flash Memory Summit in the Santa Clara Convention Center on Wednesday and Thursday.